Weather Forecast

2016 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

12:48 minutes

Guan Xiao

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Mixed clips from her collection of thousands of images found online, the three-channel video Weather Forecast is an inquiry into the necessity of a physical movement (a travel) for our identity to transform or change. The question “Why can’t we view Europe from a chair?” periodically punctuates the video, suggesting that a similar personal transformation could occur by experiencing a place through the Internet and staying in the same place. Few episodes appear, each being a transformation process in itself, either by correlation, juxtaposition, combinations of specific matters such as iconography, texts, landscapes, events. Drawing a parallel between how identity transforms and how weather evolves over time, the video possibly hints to an escape from current political and geopolitical issues, and expressly on in the context of the refugee crisis and terrorism in Europe.

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Guan Xiao is known for her videos composed primarily of found images and videos and her sculptures that explore the logic by which things relate to one another. Her practice addresses ideas of permanence, transformations, and perception Since the beginning of her practice, ­she began collecting material from various sources including YouTube, DVDs, home video libraries and other footage archives in addition to producing her own original content. Her sculptures often reference forms of the old—mimicking relic-like characteristics and totemic shapes—juxtaposed within a contemporary configuration. For example, The Documentary: Geocentric Puncture (2012) positioned fake artifacts against professional photography studio sets. In a similar way with her videos, Guan initiates a rereading of existing material by presenting a new visual language that is stripped of context and resists pre-conceived associations. Conceding equal importance to objects, people and phenomena, Guan Xiao’s videos often explore how our experience of browsing the Internet shapes our vision of the world and our own – always in transformation – identities.

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Colors:

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• internet.n.01
• picture.n.01
• identity.n.02
• motion.n.03
• society.n.01
• change.n.01